On the Cave of the Nymphs

plied. I owe its use to the friendship of a celebrated man and my preceptor, who has deserved remarkably well of me, Chr. Saxius.

Finally, the Basel printers issued a fourth edition of Homer's Works in the year 1551, in folio, neither augmented nor corrected from the previous ones: but, as happens, it was published more correctly in some places, but in others more faultily, which is the same fate that the booklet of Porphyry underwent.

A happier fortune befell it in the following century, the seventeenth. For Lucas Holstenius, a man of accurate learning and famous for various writings already existing beforehand, while he was occupied at Rome with unfolding the Vatican codices, formed the plan to re-edit the Life of Pythagoras, written by our Philosopher, with his other minor works, namely the Dissertation on the Cave of the Nymphs and the Fragment on the Styx. This edition appeared in Greek and Latin at Rome in the year 1630, in octavo; but I have not seen it: nor do I believe Holstenius added anything that would have been worth my repeating.

For twenty-five years later, namely in the year 1655, the Cambridge scholars, having published the Enchiridion of Epictetus with the Commentaries of Arrian in octavo format, decided to include the more famous Works of Porphyry in the same volume. For this purpose, they reprinted in their own types his most luminous Commentaries On Abstinence from Animal Food, with a few notes by some John Valentinus, and then the Life of Pythagoras, the Dissertation on the Cave of the Nymphs, and the Fragment on the Styx, according to the Roman edition of Holstenius.

Toward the beginning of this century, Jos. Barnesius, a man excessively diligent, and in whom there is nothing to praise except his desire to deserve well of letters, after he had conceived the plan to increase the great mass of useless books with which the learned world was already burdened at that time with a new edition of Homer, at the threshold of the first volume, which appeared at Cambridge in the year 1711, in second or fourth format, ordered certain minor works pertaining to the reading of Homer to be reprinted, and among these, the booklet of Porphyry on the Cave of the Nymphs. The Latin translation of Holstenius is lacking in this edition: otherwise, it was reviewed quite accurately and can be considered more correct than the others.